I have played the piano and sung with it for most of my life. I’ve rarely ever sung in a choir, though. This weekend I’m going to audition to sing with the Orchestra Iowa Chorus. They’re doing Mozart’s Requiem in the spring. That could be really fun. 🤞
In Which Chris & Becky Visit Yale
When I was probably 15 years old, a nerdy homeschooled kid living in Texas, I was one day browsing a clothing rack at some cheap retailer - probably K-Mart or whatever the 1990’s equivalent of TJMaxx is today - and finding a royal blue t-shirt with the Yale Bulldogs logo on it. I knew Yale was a prestigious school but not much more than that. My nerdy self sort of liked the shirt, so I bought it and wore it regularly. Occasionally I would get questions on it. “Are you going to Yale?” No, I would reply, I just liked the shirt. In these pre-Internet (at least for us!) days, what I knew about Yale was basically what my folks had said: super-expensive, super-liberal. We were super-conservative and super-poor, so that was basically that. (I eventually attended a less-expensive, but still private, Christian university that was a lot closer to home.)
It was only much later in my life that I realized that the catalog price published for university tuition is like the “room rate” you see posted on the inside of hotel room doors - a huge number that frequently doesn’t reflect the reality of what you’ll have to put out of pocket. In retrospect, my story had all the hallmarks of a good case for a big Ivy League scholarship. A unique educational background. Fantastic test scores and grades. Superb writing skills. Reasonable extracurriculars. In reality’s timeline, I took the highest scholarship that LeTourneau gave for academics (only 20% of my yearly cost!), coupled it with a bunch of grants, and still paid off college loans for a decade afterward. I got a reasonably good education at LeTourneau, met my wife there, got a job, moved to Iowa, hadn’t thought about Yale in a long time.
Earlier this year my work team won a big corporate award, and earlier this week we got to travel to one of our big corporate headquarters sites in Connecticut to be honored at an awards banquet. We all got to bring a +1, so we had several spouses in attendance too. Becky came along and we lightly stretched the travel to make a mini-vacation of it. (As much as a 3-day, 2-night trip can be a vacation, I guess.)
One of those days while we were out sightseeing we drove out to New Haven and spent a couple hours walking around the Yale campus, visiting its museums, sticking our heads into the old buildings, and generally taking in the scene. We’ve walked around a few college campuses the past few years with the kids doing college tours themselves. Campuses have a unique energy, and at an elite school this is amplified. On one hand, I observed, it’s Yale - everybody there is special. That’s sort of table stakes for admission. On the other hand, it’s clear that all these “special” students are still really just 18-to-20-something college kids.
I wondered, as we walked down the shady streets and past the old stone buildings, how would 18-year-old Chris have handled Yale? It would’ve been a move halfway across the country, a country boy plopped down in an East coast city, a sheltered conservative religious kid at a secular institution. Would I have been the stubborn fundamentalist arguing with all my professors? The church kid who went to college and gave up his faith? Or could the sudden emergence from my evangelical bubble have accelerated my movement toward the more tolerant, liberal faith that I have finally come to in my 40s?
What-if’s like this are to a great extent pointless. There are no do-overs. I’m happy and content with where my path has taken me. I was probably better suited for engineering than humanities or law, anyway. But for one fall afternoon, it was fun to walk down the streets of New Haven and idly imagine other pasts.
2024 Reads: Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde 📚
It’s rare that I read a novel that feels like nothing I’ve read before. This combination of clever humor and dystopian adventure was a real winner.
What we need more of in popular music today: powerful and appealing ballads with ukulele accompaniment.
If Moses really signed this I think they should be asking more than $75.
Finding it remarkably hard to decline an automatic upgrade on American Airlines. I just wanna keep my economy seat next to my wife!
Eric Collins has play-by-play for the Iowa-Troy game on FS1 today and sounds like Gus Johnson on coke. Yelling to the point his voice breaks for a fumble in the 4th quarter of a 10-point game. Bro, take it down a notch. Maybe two.
Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve preordered a new iPhone on release day. 16 Pro 256 GB in natural titanium. 👍
Made it to YOW plenty early for my flight home… turns out US Border Patrol doesn’t open until 0500. At least I’ll be within the first dozen in line once they do…
I knew that the WNBA audience has grown substantially this year. I was still surprised to turn on TSN here at my Canadian hotel and see the Aces-Fever game on. (I’ll forgive them for the crap video quality, which might be the hotel’s fault and not TSN’s.)
Summer has been for family trips and fun; fall is apparently now for work travel. 5 of the next 9 weeks I will be out for at least part of the week for meetings or conferences. Today: CID -> ORD -> YOW. 🇨🇦
2024 Reads: An Autobiography by Mohandas K. Gandhi 📚
If one of the Desert Fathers had training as a lawyer and wrote a Substack, you would get something like this book. Gandhi: super-weird.
Look I know we’re only 6 quarters into the season, but this Nebraska football team looks WAY better than they did last year. This is fun to watch.
Sitting out on the drive with a fire going and the football game on. The kid is there in person. #GBR #football
PRd my 5k this morning! (27:55 still has lots of room for improvement!) Beautiful chilly morning for a race.
There are days where work drives me bonkers; there are other days when I come away deeply appreciative that I work with some fantastic engineers doing really good stuff. Today is one of the latter. Thankful.
Nice cool morning to get out and run. 5k nice and steady. Running my first real race in several years on Saturday.
Caitlin Clark with a garbage rebound at the end of the game to make it a triple-double. What a performance!
As a first year WNBA follower, one of my big takeaways is that the league needs to upgrade their refs. So many poor and uncommunicated calls every game. Women’s college basketball has better officiating.
The blessing of the dedicated civil servant
There’s a wonderful long-form profile on the Washington Post right now about Chris Mark, a man who eschewed an opportunity for a upper-class education to (literally) go work in the coal mines, and ended up revolutionizing coal mine safety. (That’s a gift link, so you can read it whether you’re a WaPo subscriber or not.) It’s a compelling story of a man, driven by some complex family dynamics, who found his niche and ended up in a government job where he could follow that interest in a direction that has resulted in countless miners' lives saved over his career.
The value of experts in government driving regulation gets stated explicitly late in the piece:
Every now and then, however, Chris’s work slipped into public view. His coal mine roof rating was used all over the world and, in his own narrow circles, he was well known. In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the Journal of Technology and Culture. The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”
Government functionaries can be an easy target for criticism, but this profile highlights the key and dedicated role that so many play in today’s society. In my own work I have encountered many Federal Aviation Administration employees who fit a similar profile. They found some particular niche interest related to flying, and they made it their life’s work to make it better and safer. It’s often a thankless job, and on a government pay scale that pales next to what they could likely make in industry.
(As a side note, this is part of what makes Trump’s Project 2025 intentions to politicize the civil service so terrifying: it would eliminate protections on just these dedicated experts to replace them with people who don’t know the topic but who donated to the right political cause. You wanna see the country (literally) crumble? Ditch all the regulatory experts like Chris Mark and replace them with Heritage Foundation interns.)